Augustine
on Evilby Gregory Koukl
A very interesting, accessible, and brief article from a Christian
perspective. I strongly recommend that you read this as it makes
one aspect of Augustine's influence quite clear.

Augustine
of HippoSomething of a fan site for Augustine aficionados.
There is a lot of material here, including Augustine's major texts
(in Latin, even.) Use this selectively to investigate what people
are saying about Augustine today.

"Understand
so that you may believe, believe so that you may understand." [On
the Gospel of John, 29.6; Sermon CXVII.I]

Aurelius Augustinus (St. Augustine) lived
in the Roman Empire from 354 to 430 A.D. In 386 he converted to Christianity
from the pagan Machanean religion. He was a teacher of rhetoric and became
the Bishop of the city of Hippo. His Confessions, The City of
God, and Enchiridion are among the most influential works of
Western thought.

Augustine's work in metaphysics, ethics, and politics remain important
today. Key among these accomplishments are his metaphysical analysis of
time, his ethical analysis of the evil, and his examination of the conditions
for justified war.

Augustine's most profound impact, however, comes from his interpretation
of Christianity. In 400 C. E., Christianity was barely four centuries
years old, far younger than some competing religions and not unified in
its own doctrine. Augustine produced a sophisticated interpretation of
Christian thinking by merging it with the philosophy of Plato
and Neoplatonism. With this merger
of ideas, Christianity takes on the idea of God as an independent, immaterial
reality - the transcendent God. This idea of God is so familiar to many
of us now that it may seem odd to think of God in any other way. Still,
it was Augustine's appropriation of Plato's two-level view of reality
that produced the mysterious non-material God who exists outside of all
space and time (e.g. is infinite and eternal).

Certainly, other people including Christians had expressed such metaphysical
conceptions of God before, but Augustine brought to Christianity an intellectual
account and body of reasoned arguments to ground these ideas. The overarching
point here is that Augustine applied philosophical analysis and reasoning
to the issues of religion. Mere belief without questioning and truth seeking
were not sufficient for a genuine faith. For him, believing and understanding
were interrelated states of mind.

The bottom line is this: if you identify yourself as Christian, then
familiarity with Augustine's thought is crucial to knowing the sources
of your beliefs; if you recognize Christianity as an important factor
in Western culture and world history, then knowing about Augustine is
vital to understanding how it came to be.